Post 11: Trying to feel "at home"

Post 11 Terrace and I had a conversation last Sunday morning in the parking lot of Sobeys during “date day” AKA grocery shopping and errands. He asked what I was going to write about next. I answered with “This is the shitty stuff. All the yucky times in our marriage.” Here’s why I’m torn: It’s my story, my learning, my pain, my joy. But he’s also in most of them 😉. And they are all the darkest and hardest times in our marriage. You know, the stuff couples don’t ever talk about and certainly don’t share with people publicly. When I first decided to do this, I asked Terrace if he was okay with it and if anything was off limits. He replied with “I’ve owned my shit.” The points of the stories are never the “thing” that happened but what was learned after the fact, sometimes many years after the fact. I was reminded recently that life has a funny (interesting, cruel) way of reminding me I’m not really in control. I say that because I feel like every time I think I have things figured out, I have a plan, life tells me things are going in a different direction. Over the years I’ve held on vehemently to some things, only to learn that the lesson was to let it go. So here’s a front row seat to the early years of my marriage. Don’t get me wrong, we had lots of good times. But it was through the hardest of times that I/we had the most growth, personally and in our relationship. ---- When Charli and I moved back from China, it was June 2005. In preparation for it, Terrace was to get rid of his roommates. Now, the house he was living in (the house we are still in) belonged to his baba and gido. Both Terrace’s dad and uncle had (or felt they had) a stake in it as baba had passed on a few years prior. It was awkward to come into as it didn’t feel like my house, my space. Right around this time Terrace had gone from owning his own semi-truck and trailer to selling it and becoming an employee of the paving company he had worked for for the previous 10 years. Fuel prices had gone up and everything was so expensive he wasn’t making any money. At this time, I am at home working on my degree and taking care of Charli. His employee rate when he first started was $13/hour. Still crazy to me we lived on that. The house after baba’s death had been mismanaged, so it was going into foreclosure. None of the family members could or wanted to bail it out, so a family friend did with the intention of Terrace cleaning up his credit and us purchasing it back from him in a year. I remember looking at new communities going up in the south of Edmonton and really wanting to move. It wasn’t an option for Terrace to leave Edmonton at the time, so I thought at least if we were on the south side of Edmonton, I’d be closer to Calgary. For Terrace, this house was just too good a deal not to stay plus I think there was some guilt from family members about “keeping it in the family.” For me it meant too many people thinking they were entitled to an opinion about the house. So maybe a sore spot for me. It wouldn’t be even two weeks later that we had assumed the mortgage and the title was in our name that that family friend would pass away. Considering it was just a handshake deal, I felt incredibly lucky in our timing of things. Within the year, as we were trying to use some of the equity to finish renovations on the house, we would find out that Terrace’s uncle had put a caveat on the house, which meant we couldn’t do anything. He felt he was owed some money between Terrace’s dad and their mother, and since that was not happening, he thought it was okay to use whatever means necessarily to get someone (Terrace) to pay it. Really poor timing as we were in the middle of renos, I’m very near my due date with Ben, and our wedding is less than a year away. Eventually things got sorted but none of that process was easy and nothing got done voluntarily. It took a long time for the house to feel like mine/ours. This would be one of many occasions or reminders that just because someone is family does not mean they have your best interest at heart and just because someone is family doesn’t mean you have any obligations. (Feels like Home – Chantal Kreviazuk)

Mar 9, 2020, 6:26 AM